Old scars?
I think that this person has been through some serious shit in the past, and may need my support in the present.
Fresh scars?
I think that this person has been through some serious shit recently, and may need professional support in the present.
I have two suspicious looking scars on one wrist. One from a regular old surgery and another from an accident.
New or old, I would be incredibly annoyed at anyone thinking that these would be suicide scars. Sometimes a scar is just a scar.
Yeah, my wife has had surgery for carpal tunnel and you could probably mistake the scars for a suicide attempt.
If it’s any consolation, the only person I’ve ever made the scar=suicide connection on is an ex-client who doesn’t just have a couple of scars, but probably hundreds. She mostly wears long sleeves and long pants, but I’ve seen dozens of scars on her wrists and shoulders. I know that she was actually committed for her own protection after a suicide attempt.
My response was to try to be extra patient in working with her, but I had to give that up. She is hysterical and unmanageable at the best of times and loved to show without an appointment with not only her kids, but often her kids’ friends and let a half dozen disobedient 5 year olds rip up my office while I explained that her ignorance and unwillingness to follow my advice had yet again created a problem that she waited too long to get help with to avoid penalties. So, yeah… after four years of that, I asked her not to come back.
I have scars on my left wrist and arm from running into a barbed wire fence when I was nine. I didn’t get stitches because we got seen by the doctor too late, but he said he would have stitched my wrist if we’d gotten there sooner. As a result, the scar is pretty jagged, and as luck would have it, goes down my wrist, not across it, the way, apparently, a very serious suicide attempt would look. Then I have these other lighter scars lower on my arm that could be from cutting. They aren’t, they are all from the same tangle of fence I stupidly ran into. (I was a city kid; how was I to know people in rural areas booby-trapped their property lines?)
I have been asked three or four times if they are from suicide or deliberate self-cutting, but I’ve never been asked that by a health-care professional, so I guess a professional can tell the difference, or maybe can just tell that they are decades old.
I often wonder, though, how many people see them and* don’t* ask me about them, and just assume.
I don’t assume. I’ve worked around blue collar types who have all sorts of accidental injuries, so I am more likely to think the injury came from working on something.
Self-harm scars are fairly common in my family. I have a family member who has battled suicidal ideation and self-harm as punishment for nearly 20 years, starting when she was just a kid. I have scars on my arms and abdomen from a dissociative episode. My mother had scars on her wrists but we never talked about them. She took her own life when she was 49 but she was sick for years. My grandfather tried to kill himself with poison when I was a kid so his scars were mostly on the inside.
So I guess I’d feel sympathetic.
That’s a good point. I can imagine that it must be annoying to have scars from 30 or 40 years ago and be constantly harassed, screened, and rescreened down the decades, being referred for intensive psychiatric assessment every time one sees the doctor regardless of how long the problem has been resolved. How often does that happen? Is it possible to get some sort of certificate that a person can show medical staff to convince them that such scars are no longer relevant to a person’s current mental health?
Tough one.
There are some professions where you are mandated to try and determine the degree of risk someone is in. Risk to self or others as the phrase goes. Medical and psychiatric fields come to mind. Anyone dealing with children (teachers, coaches, etc). I did a lot of time as a crisis counselor and there were certain situations where I had to take action.
Outside of those settings, I try not to assume. My mom has gnarly arm scars from falling while trying to scrape gum off her classroom ceiling. Compound fracture, surgery, yada, yada. Tina Fey’s scar drove me nuts for years until I found out what caused it.
It’s human nature to be curious. I just try not to leap to conclusions.
As someone who has a pretty scary scar from a freak accident (across a wrist), I reserve judgement of others until further details come to light.
What do I think? “How sad.”
What do I say? Nothing.
What do I do? Nothing.
Sometimes that risk is “None.” A person with aged scars that could or could not be from a suicide attempt, who presents at an acute care clinic for a fever, earache, and dizziness probably has an ear or sinus infection, and does not need to be assessed for suicide, particularly since they may be emotionally fine, but because they are feeling unwell have a low tolerance for being kept waiting for the psychiatrist on-call, and answering a battery of personal questions, which will probably be skewed toward “depression,” since the same cursory evaluation of a sick person and a well but depressed person can be similar.
I’m just dreading the day I go to an acute care clinic for strep, or a bad sinus infection that is giving me a terrible headache, and some over-eager intern calls a psych consult for the scar on my wrist that is 40 years old, and isn’t even from a suicide attempt anyway.
I have some fairly visible scars on my left wrist from a suicide attempt a couple years ago. Most people don’t say a word, though I have gotten some funny looks. I can only think of two occasions where people have done more than look at my scars funny. The first occasion was during a job interview, where it was understandable. The second time however …
Yeah, stuff like that happens. I received a 72 hour psych hold once, because I was “uncooperative” with a doctor when he started grilling me about my scars and mental health. For the record, I was admitted for strep throat and trouble breathing, nothing psych related, and I was medicated and lucid. He just wouldn’t take no for an answer. When I eventually tried to leave AMA he declared me suicidal and I was “escorted” to a locked room.
The next morning they let me use my phone, and I called my lawyer and explained the situation. Ten minutes after my lawyer showed up at the hospital, I was free to go. As a stoner, I always figured I’d need a lawyer to get my ass out of jail, not a hospital, but that’s how it played out.
Last fall my cat left a nice long rip along my left arm and curving across my wrist.
Two people asked me about it in public, with concern in their voices. I have no idea how many others saw it and said nothing, but thought it was a suicide attempt.
As I told the two people who asked “I don’t have to try to kill myself. I have a cat.”
A few people have asked me if my barbed wire scar is from a cat. One person said “So, try to bathe your cat?”
Gosh, I wonder out of 100 people with wrist scars, how many are self-inflicted, and how many just happen to be wrist scars? and of the deliberate ones, how many are suicide attempts, and how many are non-lethally intended self injury? My husband has a scar on his arm from childhood that was stitched, and if you rotated it 1/4, then moved it down about 2 inches, it would be a Hollywood perfect suicide scar. It’s serendipitous that it landed where it did, and not right across his vein, just like mine is, right where a suicide scar would be.
Thanks for changing my clunky title, Asimovian and thanks all for replying, especially those that expressed an interest in my well being 
Yes, I do have old scars on my wrists (very old - all is well now) and the thought occurred to me when the medical peeps tried six different places from which to draw blood, including right smack dab in the middle of one of said scars:confused: (which they couldn’t do because scar tissue!). I can’t say that I think of it often, but for some reason that got me to feeling self conscious.
“So you failed at killing yourself too huh?”
I had a job once where I had to get a yearly TB test, and they always do it on the left arm, not sure why. Usually, someone came into the office to do them, and the person never blinked at the scars on my arm.
Once, though, I missed the office person (I was out of town), so I had to go to a clinic for my test, and I got a vibe, it’s hard to explain, but I just felt like I needed to get them to use my right arm, so I lied and said that I had a bit of poison ivy rash on my left arm. So they used my right, made a note in my chart, and everything was fine.
Possibly it was that when I checked in, the standard name and address form had some mental health questions (preceded by “we care about your feelings”), that made me wary.
When the clinic is going the extra mile, I can’t help wondering if they’d recently had some kind of incident, the type that begets lawsuits, and so were bending the other way to find possible “problems,” and avoid anymore future trouble. People are less likely to sue over their rights being violated, than next-of-kin are over a potential suicide/homicide being allowed to walk out of a clinic without being questioned, even if he wasn’t there for mental health issues. But for whatever reason, the clinic seemed to be hoisting the heavy-duty antennae.